Greenville electric bus manufacturer Proterra has won an initial bid to provide 11 no-emission buses to Clemson Area Transit by this time next year.

Clemson City Council members, who voted on the deal earlier this week, authorized city officials to enter negotiations with the bus maker over the next couple of weeks, and a final vote on a deal with Proterra will likely take place during the regular council meeting on Sept. 5.

Proterra beat out two other bidders — Chinese IT giant BYD ("Build Your Dreams") and Canadian bus maker New Flyer — for the Clemson contract, according to Clemson Area Transit's interim director, Keith Moody. Negotiations are ongoing, but the deal will likely include overnight trickle-charge stations and long-range buses, Moody said.

"We are very excited," Moody said Tuesday. "The team here is excited about the decision. I spoke to Proterra's CEO Ryan Popple last night, and they very pleased with the decision."

To date, Proterra has built all its electric buses at its manufacturing facility in Greenville; the company's headquarters are in California.

"We are neighbors; we are right in their backyard," Moody said. "We think we can be a showpiece for them."

Moody said CATbus has a goal to be 100 percent electric in the next couple of years. The system's request for proposals (RFP) for the electric-bus plan, issued in spring, called for a base order of 11 buses with an option to buy 28 more as funding becomes available.

CATbus currently maintains a fleet of about 34 buses for its eight routes.

Clemson co-authored the RFP with the Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) in Atlanta as well as the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., and SolTrans in Vallejo, Calif. The California transit systems piggy-backed on the Clemson RFP to streamline procurement of 10 electric buses that each of them wants.

All told, Proterra is looking at selling up to 59 buses to the three transit systems through Clemson's original RFP.

Eric McCarthy, Proterra's vice president for government relations, said his company looks forward to continuing its relationship with CATbus and supporting the system's goal to provide zero-emission transit services through battery-powered buses and charging equipment. Twenty-three Clemson University graduates — most of them engineers — currently work at Proterra in Greenville, McCarthy said, and are excited about designing and building buses that would run in alma mater.

"We are just incredibly excited to expand our deployment here in the Upstate," McCarthy said.

CATbus is fare-free public transportation system operating in partnership with Clemson University, the cities of Clemson and Seneca and the towns of Central and Pendleton. Its eight routes, centered around the university, stretch from Seneca to Tri-County Tech outside Pendleton.

The company currently has a backlog of orders but would commence production on the Clemson buses in May 2018 to meet the August 2018 deadline.

"The backlog we have is a strong testament to growing interest that agencies have in zero-emission transportation and Proterra in particular," McCarthy said.

The bulk of money for the Clemson buses comes from a $3.9 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration's Low or No-Emission (Low-No) Bus Program. The Low-No program provided $55 million in bus-buying grants to municipalities in 2016, of which Clemson's grant was among the largest.

Moody said Proterra came out ahead of the competition when his agency compared the quality of technical staff and workmanship on the buses themselves. CATbus officials then compared prices, Moody said.

"(Prices) didn't change the decision," Moody said. "Proterra was still in the lead."

Each Proterra bus costs about $700,000 — down from more than $1 million per bus four years ago. Electric buses are still about twice as expensive as diesel buses, but the price gap between the two has narrowed as bulk production of batteries has brought costs down for electric buses and as regulations on diesel-bus emissions have continued to drive up costs there.

The CATbus system already operates six electric buses in Seneca, Moody said. Those buses, which belong to the city of Seneca, were largely paid for with $5.9 million in Federal Transit Authority grants.

"The FTA likes to see projects that are successful, and with the Seneca project, it's been a total success," Moody said. "We are building success onto success."